Performance evaluation of a Multi-GPU enabled finite element method for computational electromagnetics

  • Authors:

  • Tristan Cabel;Joseph Charles;Stéphane Lanteri

  • Affiliations:

  • NACHOS project-team, INRIA Sophia Antipolis-Méditerranée Research Center, Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France;NACHOS project-team, INRIA Sophia Antipolis-Méditerranée Research Center, Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France;NACHOS project-team, INRIA Sophia Antipolis-Méditerranée Research Center, Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

  • Venue:
  • Euro-Par'11 Proceedings of the 2011 international conference on Parallel Processing - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We study the performance of a multi-GPU enabled numerical methodology for the simulation of electromagnetic wave propagation in complex domains and heterogeneous media. For this purpose, the system of time-domain Maxwell equations is discretized by a discontinuous finite element method which is formulated on an unstructured tetrahedral mesh and which relies on a high order interpolation of the electromagnetic field components within a mesh element. The resulting numerical methodology is adapted to parallel computing on a cluster of GPU acceleration cards by adopting a hybrid strategy which combines a coarse grain SPMD programming model for inter-GPU parallelization and a fine grain SIMD programming model for intra-GPU parallelization. The performance improvement resulting from this multiple-GPU algorithmic adaptation is demonstrated through three-dimensional simulations of the propagation of an electromagnetic wave in the head of a mobile phone user.